The intersection between music and movies has always been blurry, with stars like Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez and Childish Gambino proving that talent can be showcased both in the studio and in front of the camera. For Ryan Gosling, who has perhaps always been considered an actor first, the foray into music has come with unprecedented success.
Gosling’s vocal chops for the Barbie soundtrack song “I’m Just Ken” have earned him and producer Mark Ronson some 20 nominations, including nods at the Golden Globes, The Grammys, the Academy Awards, and The Critics’ Choice Awards.
Gosling even collected the win for the lattermost award, and is set to perform “I’m Just Ken” at next month’s Oscars ceremony. With such an impressive run in the wake of “I’m Just Ken” — which boasts over 100 million streams and debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 — one has to wonder whether Barbie was Gosling’s first musical effort in a movie. So just how many movies has Ryan Gosling sung in?
How many movies has Ryan Gosling sung in?
By all accounts, Gosling has sung in six of the films he has starred in, though the degree of his performances depends on the movie. The first instance of Gosling singing in a film arrived in 2007, when he featured in the cast of Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl. During one scene, Gosling can be heard serenading his sex-doll girlfriend with a rendition of Nat King Cole’s song “L.O.V.E.”.
Gosling’s next singing performance came in 2010’s Blue Valentine, the romantic drama in which he starred opposite Michelle Williams. At one point during the film, Gosling touts a ukulele and performs the Mills Brothers song “You Always Hurt the One You Love,” admitting to Williams that he “can’t really sing” (a bold-faced lie).
Gosling briefly held a tune in 2012’s The Place Beyond the Pines, singing in Spanish to his co-star Olga Merediz. The actor again brought music to the fore in 2017, as part of Terrence Malick’s experimental drama Song to Song. Gosling plays a musician in the film, and at one point performs a duet with Lykke Li of the Bob Marley and the Wailers song “It Hurts to Be Alone.”
These are merely footnotes in Gosling’s movie singing career, however, since his big break came with 2016’s La La Land. It was within the Damien Chazelle film that Gosling could fully showcase his vocal chops, contributing to a whole host of original songs written for La La Land. City of Stars and A Lovely Night are perhaps Gosling’s most-known tracks from the movie, but he sings regularly throughout (it is a musical after all).
Which brings us to Barbie and the inescapable earworm that is “I’m Just Ken.” It actually is Gosling’s singing voice heard on the track, though perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. The actor got his start as a Mouseketeer on Disney Channel’s The Mickey Mouse Club, where he rubbed shoulders with now-prolific artists like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Justin Timberlake.